RSA announces professional services for locking down security of large enterprises

San Francisco -- RSA, the security division of EMC, kicks off its annual security conference on IT security today with a pitch to establish its new Big Data Security and risk-governance products as a foundation for security operations centers. And RSA says it'll send in its security professionals to help set them up, too.

RSA recently made available its RSA Security Analytics platform that's intended to be used to detect attacks, especially stealthy ones, by analyzing large amounts of content data that would be stored in a Hadoop database for threat-detection analysis in conjunction with RSA's security-event and information management product, enVision. Knowing there will be an audience of thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference, this Big Data Security topic is also expected to be the focus of the keynote tomorrow by Art Coviello, executive chairman of EMC and executive chairman of RSA.

RSA is arguing that the combination of its RSA Security Analytics platform with other RSA tools, including its updated Advanced Incident Management for Security, the RSA Archer Governance, Risk and Compliance software and the RSA Data Loss Prevention suite provide a way for companies to build modernized security operations centers.

RSA's Big Data Security push, says Steve Schlarman, eGRC solutions manager at RSA, is "adding business context" intelligence related to enterprise content that goes beyond traditional security alerts to help companies defend themselves against stealthy attacks in particular. Though RSA won't name customers using its technology today, Sclarman said it includes federal agencies.

RSA today is also announcing a professional-services group that's organized to help companies set up these types of security operations centers, said Peter Tran, senior director of the RSA advanced cyber defense practice.

The RSA NextGen Security Operations Centers services, as they're called, would be based mainly but not exclusively on RSA security and compliance products. "We work to optimize what they currently have," Tran said.

Big Data Security is viewed as an emerging field with a lot of promise for discovering threats to corporate assets or unauthorized employee behavior by mining large amounts of business content that was traditionally not typically used for security analysis in the past. RS, is not the only vendor eager to try and explain its direction in Big Data Security -- HP is also making its major announcement related to it today, and IBM late last month also made its first major Big Data Security push.